https://aboutactorjonhamm.blogspot.fr/2017/06/why-jon-hamm-hasnt-become-movie-star-yet.html
By Adam White, 18 July 2017
Ten years ago this week, when Mad Men first debuted on American television, you’d be hard pressed to find many articles that didn’t refer to Jon Hamm as a sharp-suited throwback to the movie stars of the Fifties and Sixties -- a 21st century version of a Cary Grant type, a kind of twinkle-eyed, tall, dark and handsome matinee idol that had fallen out of favour in an era of schlubby A-listers like Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler.
“He was the only person I saw that I felt had this old-fashioned masculinity,” series creator Matthew Weiner told Vanity Fair in 2009. “He reminded me a little of James Garner, or William Holden, or the other movie stars that I loved who were Boy Scouts.”
Like George Clooney before him, a breathless movie-star-in-waiting hysteria seemed to trail Hamm throughout his tenure on the series. But, unlike Clooney, who parlayed his ER fame into a film career that has made him a Hollywood industry all his own, Hamm’s post-Mad Men choices have largely, outside of one or two exceptions, been whimpers. Part of this is self-initiated, but it also speaks to the curse of being a throwback to a vintage Hollywood: in an era where brands and universes and capes and tights have eclipsed the importance of singular movie stars, it’s become harder for an actor like Jon Hamm to find a slot for himself.
Hamm has brought up the industry’s reliance on superhero properties often, after claiming he has turned down several since he came to fame on Mad Men. He’s hinted at having met with Marvel once or twice, and has outright stated he turned down 2011’s doomed Green Lantern. “Meh, that's not what I want to do,” he told GQ Magazine. “Never say never, but those aren’t the kind of movies I like to go see. They don’t make the kind of movies I like to see any more.”
It’s a melancholy quote, of the sort Hamm is familiarly dropping into conversation with journalists, but one laced with an underlying truth. While Clooney had Batman & Robin during his ER tenure, he also filled his summer hiatuses shooting films like the romcom One Fine Day, the nutty B-movie From Dusk Till Dawn, and the noir classic Out of Sight -- all mid-budget movies without much in the way of franchise potential, but that still managed to earn a decent return at the box office.
The Hollywood landscape Hamm entered in the wake of Don Draper, however, was very different. Outside of a memorable cameo in Bridesmaids, playing Kristen Wiig’s horrifyingly unsavoury paramour, his supporting roles in the likes of The Town, Sucker Punch and the Allen Ginsberg tale Howl have been largely forgotten. His action comedy Keeping Up with the Joneses was one of the biggest flops of 2016, while indies like Marjorie Prime and The Congress barely escaped the festival circuit.
There’s something admirable about Hamm’s decision to mostly leave other actors to take centre stage in his films, but there have also been moments when he has tried to inhabit the role of leading man himself, notably the 2014 Disney film Million Dollar Arm. The sort of project that would have been tailor-made for Kevin Costner in his Field of Dreams heyday, Million Dollar Arm cast Hamm as a sports agent who heads to Mumbai to find cricketers who could potentially play American baseball. Aimed squarely at the heartland Blind Side crowd, Disney had high hopes for the film, company CEO Alan Horn claiming it had the strongest test scores with preview audiences that he’d ever seen during his career.
But the film bombed in the US, and if an American sports movie craters at home, odds are it won’t be able to clean up overseas either. It was subsequently barely released internationally. But speaking to Vanity Fair ahead of its US debut, Hamm seemed uncertain of its chances.
“It’s a little movie,” he said. “It’s not an Academy Award movie, it’s not a big-idea movie, and it’s not about politics or robots or anything they make movies about these days. It’s kind of a throwback to these old-style Disney movies.”
Throwback. Old. There are those words again. While the story of Hamm’s pre-Mad Men unemployment is legendary, experiencing constant rejection and working as a set dresser on softcore porn sets to pay the pills, he now often seems to glorify the past, and regularly appears to despair at a world filled with Instagram influencers and Kardashian spawn, both of which he has railroaded in interviews.
“Ask anyone under the age of 20 if they have heard of me, and they will go, ‘No, that guy looks like my dad,’” he told the Radio Times in 2014 (via Hollywood Reporter). “It doesn’t compute to the generation that most of Hollywood cares about if your last name’s not Hemsworth or you are not in One Direction or you don’t wear a cape and tights for a living, you literally have a hard time making an impression.”
It’s at least partly true, with seemingly the majority of young aspiring male movie stars flocking to DC or Marvel in the hopes of becoming leading men. But like his fellow Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss, Hamm has found greater post-Don Draper success on television, where he began distorting his Mad Men persona while the show was still on the air.
There was his great recurring role as Liz Lemon’s gorgeous-but-deathly-dumb boyfriend Drew on 30 Rock, the well-received Sky Arts comedy A Young Doctor’s Notebook alongside Daniel Radcliffe, and memorably weird performances in comedies like Wet Hot American Summer, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Children’s Hospital. He’s also a regular guest voice on an array of comedy podcasts, from Comedy Bang Bang to Spontaneanation, where he has shown off his skills in improv and wacky accents alongside close comedian friends including Paul Rudd, Zach Galifianakis and David Cross. Hamm has claimed the move into predominantly silly comedy was intentional.
“Once Mad Men blew up, it was a conscious decision on my part to pivot away from all that,” he told Mr. Porter last year. “It’s no secret that I was offered a ton of parts that involved a hat and a cigarette and a glass of brown liquor. But I was like, I do that already. I played Don Draper for 93 episodes – that’s enough. If you just want to do the same thing again and again, why get into acting?”
But in the same interview, Hamm once again slammed the dominance of superheroes and enormous CGI spectacles in Hollywood, and expressed slight resentment that he wasn’t able to get serious dramas financed on his name alone.
“From a features standpoint, it’s really difficult to get hard dramas made if you’re not Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Denzel Washington or Ben Affleck,” he said. “That’s what those boys do and there are only so many slots. There are five or six leads who get the first look and if you’re lucky you might get a second.”
Much of the Jon Hamm narrative over the past few years has been that his move into comedy and away from major films was largely of his own making, that he would prefer to be the rubber-faced comic popping up unexpectedly in Netflix hits than the Oscar red carpet favourite starring in the movie equivalents of prestige television. But there are enough slightly ‘Get off my lawn!’-style quotes of his that indicate that it isn’t quite the full story, that Jon Hamm isn’t not a movie star purely because he doesn’t want to be, but more that what defines a movie star has so enormously changed in the past decade. And whether by circumstance or wilful protest, he hasn’t jumped on board.
Hamm has a couple of things in the pipeline, notably a political thriller with Rosamund Pike and a bromance comedy with Jeremy Renner and Hannibal Buress. He’s also in Baby Driver, wonderfully cast against type as a seemingly unkillable bank robber who puts Michael Myers to shame in the film’s explosive finale. But in a flashy ensemble featuring the likes of Jamie Foxx and Kevin Spacey both in gleeful scenery-chewing mode, Hamm is merely one great cog in a brilliant machine.
There are some in Hamm’s age bracket that have managed to jump quite easily between both serious dramas and big-budget studio blockbusters, from Bryan Cranston to Michael Fassbender to Kyle Chandler, who followed up the long-running, critically-adored Friday Night Lights with roles in Oscar magnets like Carol and Manchester by the Sea, along with franchise pictures like an upcoming Godzilla sequel.
Hamm, of his own making or not, hasn’t yet managed it. Baby Driver is a start, but one upcoming feature film, based on title alone, seems to be a clear indication of where Hamm is going wrong. Directed by Mark Pellington, it costars Catherine Keener and Nick Offerman, and is awkwardly called Nostalgia.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/didnt-mad-men-make-jon-hamm-movie-star/
in the Congress :
versus Clooney
in the Congress :
and Marjorie Prime is is scheduled to be released on August 18, 2017
